The Canon CanoScan CS8800F Flatbed Scanner is the best scanner that I have ever owned. Today, most folks do not buy stand alone scanners and prefer all in one machines, but I do highly recommend this scanner. I use it to scan old family photographs into digital copies for safekeeping and posterity. I think that is an important enough reason to purchase a stand alone scanner. In addition, the scanner is inexpensive and therefore will not cost you a lot of money to buy separately from any other similar machines you may have that also scan in addition to their other functions. The scanner is of excellent quality and produces excellent, quality scans that can be the be utilized to make copies and store digital copies. The only downsides are that the thing is slow and a bit bulky, but I will take that to be able to better preserve my family memories. Overall, I would recommend the Canon CanoScan CS8800F flatbed scanner to anyone at all!

ilyap30

Pikesville, MD

While looking for a good resonable scanner I came down to two models, the Canon and the HP. I selected Canon because I am a Canon fan. I looked at various other scanners but did not want to spend an outrageous amount of money purchasing one of the higher end scanners. I paid 190.00 for the 8800F and so far, it has been money well spent. This was one of the easiest products to take out of the box and set up. At higher resolution settings scanning can take quite some time. This is a high quality scanner with lots of professional options for a low price.The problem I found was it did not always do the autocrop and when I manually cropped, it did not save the cropped image. Other than that it works great.

chilimilichiken

Cupertino, CA

Canon gadjets have always been great so I got this unit and been using it for a while now and have had excellent experiences. I had to scan in a bunch of drawings so I decided on trying the canon scanner. It comes with all the needed set up and includes cords and software. I chose this model based on the price and our familiarity with the canon. I use the scanner with adobe rather than the software that came with it. The scanner also came with Adobe Elements 5.0 and another version for those that use a MAC. I still use Adobe Photoshop 7 and have yet to install the Elements version, so I can't really give any pros or cons about Elements.Overall the scanner is highly recommended to all it does the job well!

ind2011

Hainesport, NJ

I bought the CS8800 to scan a variety of negatives and slides that I will be using for family history and scrapbooking. Some of the negatives go back 70+ years and come in a variety of sizes and formats - the 8800 handles most of them and does a great job. The software interface is fairly user friendly, and while the negative and slide scans are slow, I believe from what I've read that it still is faster than competitors. Negatives: it has a fairly large footprint and as I said, it's time-consuming to scan slides and negatives (very fast scanning of prints, though!) Also, in switching back and forth from slides to negatives, the white background piece which slips in and out broke. They need to improve that part of the design to make it really useful for those of us who can't dedicate the scanner to just doing slides. On the whole, I thought this was a great value and I'm thrilled with the quality of the images I'm getting from my old slides, prints and negatives.

scrappinmom

Bellevue, NE

Several times, I've done the numbers on having my backlog of 35mm slides scanned by a service versus doing it myself with some kind of low-cost equipment. Well-reviewed scanners all had some kind of drawback or other -- or were too expensive. And I never wanted to take the risk of shipping irreplaceable slides off to a service. This time, though, the combination of good reviews, reasonable price, and compatibility with Hamrick's VueScan software tipped the balance, and I bought one of these.I am completely satisfied, both with the machine and with the economics. I looked at various services (whose prices are all over the map, by the way) and came up with a rough average of fifty cents a slide, including outbound shipping. With this scanner, I paid for that, including the cost of shipping the scanner overnight to me, in three days of quite painless effort. Around the four hundredth slide, it became free. Of course, I'm ignoring my time to do it, but since you can multi-task in between batches of four, I was able to continue work on other things. And what a simple device to set up! If (unlike some other users, apparently) you don't overlook the "unlock" switch, it came up fast and easy, worked first time, and keeps on working. As far as the software is concerned, use VueScan for flatbed work, but if you're just rescuing large numbers of slides, I find the Canon software to be extremely efficient and easy to use. If you set it up properly, you can scan four slides with one mouse click or carriage return, then go off and do something else for about four minutes, load four more, and do it again. Simplest thing I've used for this process. As always, the most clumsy thing about scanning slides is handling the slides themselves, not dropping them, getting them the right way around -- once they're in the machine, you're essentially done.

gqinxs

New York, NY

No joke I have been wanting this CanoScan scanner for over 2 years. I did a ton of research on it before deciding, then had to wait until we had the extra cash to purchase it. It's not a lot of money considering all that I am going to do with it, but our budget has been extra tight. I have only used it a few times since getting it around Christmas time and have not been able to test all the features so take that into account. The set-up was pretty easy, just follow the quick start guide. The software it comes with is a bit awkward and so far that is my only complaint. When I first scanned a photo in, the photo had dust speckles everywhere, I wiped it off and cleaned the scanner bed and tried again, not much better. Then I tried importing it through Photoshop instead of using their software and it worked like a charm. I don't know why that made a difference, but I tried both ways several times and each time bringing it in through Photoshop resulted in a much better image. The scanner comes with Photoshop Elements which I had not used before. The program is very user-friendly and with a little playing around the average person should have a lot of fun editing their pictures, or creating digital scrapbook pages. I am a digital scrapper and that's one of the reasons I wanted this scanner, to digitize old photos, negatives, and documents. I am also planning on scanning in important documents like adoption papers, birth certificates, letters, etc and saving them on portable hard drives and keeping them in a fireproof safe. This scanner is going to get a lot of use! So far I love it! So worth the money!

lotterino

Dalton, MN

This Canon canoscan CS8800F Flatbed Scanner produces some high quality scans. can make photo copies if printer is attached. Perfect for people who are bargain hunters and want something for their money's worth. Any scanner can scan, but this one is unique in its own way and scans high definition picture. When it comes to printing images from this scanner, the quality is top. In my opinion, the brand does matter that is chosen, and Canon is a top brand, has good ratings from current customers. Some people may look at the price when bying products of this quality, but it all depends on what you need and look for in a scanner. If all you need is basic scanning, the price is great, if you are looking for more options, the price will be high, but keeping one this in mind, you are getting your money's worth! The size is great, fits anywhere, on any computer desk, so when looking to not take up a lot of space, this scanner can do that for you.

Chris85PL

Elmwood Park, IL

**Canon CanoScan CS8800F Flatbed Scanner is one of the best scanner that Canon offers. I purchased it 2 months ago and really thought it worth the price. First, it scans fast! I can easily finish scanning my 200-page booklets within 15 minutes which was really unexpected! Second, it has less weight than the other scanners offered by the other manufactors which makes it easy to carry around. I have some needs to carry the scanner around between my working locations, and the less weight really made me happy to work with it! Last, it provides great quality of imaging. I tried different scanners to compare the image quality, and finally made my decision to pick this one because of the excellent performance on the imaging - clean pictures without noisy points, clear pixels, and I can easily scan all my archived photos into electric copies in my laptop for backup purpose. Generally speaking, this is a great product and I really like to share it with you!**

damacheng1981

Bellevue, WA

I was in need of a new scanner when I ran into the Canon CanoScan 8800F and thought to myself, "Hey, I have a lot of negatives that I no longer have the actual prints of - that could be useful." So while I was looking for a new scanner, I did very little research on the CanoScan. I'd say it was a bigger impulse buy, but I haven't regretted it one bit. I've had this scanner for around a year and a half now, and even with using it only a handful of times after the initial, "This is new, let's scan everything!" period of time I had to begin with, I'd say it's been worth every penny. All of my negatives are just regular old negatives from the past 15 years or so and after a couple minutes scanning and a tiny bit of touch up (improper storage of negatives = dust), the digital photos look great and so do the prints that come from them. I'm not an advanced user of scanners by any means, but for the average to casual user, I'd say this scanner is a great purchase!

friedapplepie12

Bland, VA

I bought this scanner because I used to take many, many photos with my 35mm camera, so I have counless negatives. I have negatives that my grandmother had and negatives that my mother had. I wanted to be able to save these, say a kind of backup, just in case anything ever happened to the actual negatives (heat, bugs, etc.) This scanner, apart from being a good photo/text scanner, is a good negative and slide scanner.  Ther reviews on this scanner were mostly positive, and I will also give it a positive review. It is a slightly bulky scanner, but it is to be expected because of the negative and slide adapters/holders - it takes different sizes of negatives, including the big ones from before. This is a good and easy to use scanner for anyone who wants to make sure their memories aren't completely lost by damaged negatives/slides. It is also not too loud when scanning. I've had this scanner for quite a while and would definitely reccommend it.

VangieA-H

San Antonio, TX